The first paragraph of Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now redeems the $29.99 price of admission. In a sentence therein, Mahoney states his thesis:
The “ideological” project to replace the only human condition we know with a utopian “Second Reality” oblivious to—indeed at war with—the deepest wellsprings of human nature and God’s creation has taken on renewed virulence in the late modern world, just thirty-five years after the glorious anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989.
One sees examples of this “Second Reality,” a phrase that comes out of the study of German political philosopher Eric Voegelin, in the headlines every week.
Consider, well, May. Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed legislation that allows individuals to change the sex on their driver’s license up to three times. (If it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, what explains swerves from the various other genders?) In Spokane, the city council voted to remove a statue of John R. Monaghan, part of Gonzaga’s first graduating class and the first person from the state to attend the Naval Academy, because he died defending a wounded superior from an onslaught of Samoans (Monaghan’s tough luck in not dying at the hands of Confederates or Nazis on the battlefield). Romania held a democratic election that banned the candidate leading in the polls by a 2-to-1 margin because Călin Georgescu did not “respect the Constitution and defend democracy.” In Palm Springs, a young man blew himself up outside a fertility clinic in the name of “pro-mortalism,” a misosophy whose victory, he claimed, would “finally begin the process of sterilizing this planet of the disease of life.”
Biology, history, human nature, the meaning of words, and other concepts heretofore regarded as more anchored than adrift move in strange directions commanded by the coxswains of this Second Reality.
The notion that something greater, whether God or nature, sets limits on us, and that the past offers any guide for action, repulses those forging a Second Reality. Ultimately, the believers in the ideological lie imagine themselves as their own gods and the past as useful only in demonstrating their own enlightenment. This is the ideologization of narcissism.
Three recent phenomena illustrating the rise in the Second Reality appear to especially jar the author.
First, the events of the summer of 2020, when rioters looted and murdered in the name of “social justice,” presented a topsy-turvy moralism in which the cops morphed into criminals and vice versa. For more than a year, such sights as politicians kneeling in Kente cloth, corporation heads donating someone else’s money to radical groups, cable channels canceling programs featuring the police in a positive light, and TV reporters describing protests as mostly peaceful as fires raged in the background combined for a surreal America unmoored from reality and its founding principles. America did not look like America. The ethos of the nation’s loudest voices in those dark days was not freedom but power.
“For all intents and purposes, America had a collective nervous breakdown,” Mahoney contends about the events of 2020.
Grown-ups took their bearings from eighteen-year-olds repeating mindless and extremist slogans (and finding “systematic” violence and mass killings against black Americans where they didn’t exist). In their “socially constructed” world, an ideological Second Reality competed with the common world where citizens debate and deliberate, sometimes contentiously but never violently, about matters of public import.
Second, the immediate impulse to blame October 7 on the victims—in many cases hippie Jewish girls in their early 20s attending a concert (a.k.a., the least intimidating people, with the exception of some babies, on the planet)—revealed a shocking inhumanity consistent with barbarism and incongruous with civilization, Western or otherwise.
“The least that can be said,” Mahoney writes, “is that the activists, students, professors, and administrators who deny the moral and political legitimacy of the state of Israel inhabit a fact-free zone where ideology and invective replace both empirical realities and the judicious exercise of political reason.”
Third, the attempt, widespread especially in educational institutions at all levels, to present sex as decided by the individual rather than determined at birth—and to punish anyone who says otherwise—indicates both a rebellion against biology and the autonomy of the individual to say what he or she thinks. In other words, one may declare oneself any one of 72 genders, but one may not refuse to recognize 70 of those genders in others.
So the book feels very much ripped from the headlines, very now, very 2025. Then one grasps that The Persistence of the Ideological Lie looks at 2025 through the lens of what Mahoney rightly refers to as an annus mirabilis. This is as much a book about 1989 as it is a book about 2025.
Mahoney writes that Communism “unequivocally stood for violence, mendacity, shortages, corruption, and national humiliation. I will go further: the events of 1989 were the end of a two-hundred-year cycle of ‘total revolution’ inaugurated by the French Revolution and ‘perfected’ by Bolshevism and its offspring (e.g. Maoism, Castroism, Pol Potism) in the twentieth century.”
This seems at once a profound and obvious observation. “The purpose of philosophers,” Eric Hoffer observed, “is to show people what is right under their noses.” Mahoney does this here in depicting 1789 as start and 1989 as end. The bloody, ideological revolutions that began in 1789 hit a prolonged Thermidor in 1989.
At that point, an evil that many imagined as permanent suddenly disappeared. “It feels good to be alive,” the band Jesus Jones sang about history’s sharp pivot. “I saw the decade end waiting for the world to change at the blink of an eye/and if anything, then there’s your sign of the times.” The song captures the joy and optimism of the triumphant end of the 1980s. Old video of Germans celebrating as they took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall captures it. Otherwise, the astonishment, exhilaration, and the rest of the positive feelings pose difficulties as one tries to convey them 35 years later to people who did not live through it.
Everything felt possible then. And history, in some instances in a perverse sense, validates that feeling. Yes, Prague, Krakow, Budapest, and other great European cities escaped grim totalitarianism for the freedom befitting them. One cannot minimize that profoundly beneficial development. But parts of the free West slowly came to embrace the “Second Reality,” which shapeshifted from Soviet Marxism to something more expansive than a homo economicusphilosophy. That magnificent year not only liberated those suffering under leftists; it liberated the left as well. Mahoney explains that “the Marxism of Marx no longer has to carry the noose of Soviet Communism around its neck.”
Why not? Hollywood, which produced innumerable films about World War II and Vietnam, decided to strangely overlook stories of Communist atrocities and the perseverance of victims. So widespread is this suppression that one must read subtitles in The Lives of Others to take in a film that deals with Communism in an honest and compelling way. In higher education, a few lamented rather than celebrated the fall of Communism; most others simply ignored it, presumably because it mucked up narratives. One recalls bizarre stories from ABC News and elsewhere in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union on the event’s adverse impact on Russians. So Communism ceased acting as an albatross on the left, and the left increasingly looked to culture rather than just economics to impose Marxism.
The chapter “The Lost Promise of 1989” encapsulates freedom’s wasted opportunity. Inhabitants of the free world rejoiced in the assumption that the Communist nations behind the Iron Curtain would become like us. They did. But we became more like them, too. That this happened so swiftly, within a few decades, shocks in that it shocks. If such forbidding, familiar faces as Erich Honecker, Wojciech Jaruzelski, and Nicolae Ceaușescu could all fall from power within weeks, then the West’s slow embrace of ideas inimical to freedom over a generation should not come as such a surprise. Nevertheless, it does.
“The revolution of 1989 was a decisive repudiation of the ideological poisons that had deformed modernity,” notes The Persistence of the Ideological Lie.
It is a decisive repudiation that many on the militant left would like to erase. There is absolutely no reason today for socialism—and even Communism—to have the prestige it has with many young Americans. Crucial lessons about the twentieth century have sadly not been passed on to young people in any serious or significant way. A crucial opportunity has been lost.
The march of events suggests something more hopeful about the direction of the present than it does about the lost lessons of the past. Comedy, primarily drawing laughs fairly recently from ideological solidarity more than any inherent humor in the jokes, now finds its biggest stars in Dave Chappelle, Shane Gillis, Tony Hinchcliffe, and others not merely unafraid to offend but attracted to such mischief. The On Patrol: Live reincarnation of Live PD, Cops, and other programs pulled from the airwaves in 2020 seem as popular as ever. And Donald Trump, Tourette’s-like in his use of words deemed obscenities by the woke, again serves as president of the United States.
Second Reality has seen better realities.
The Persistence of the Ideological Lie is a slim book about a fat target. It consists mostly of previously published essays. Its author points out that he wrote them under the rubric of an overall theme that he had always intended to place between covers, and the reader, not noticing any disjointedness or discontinuity, affirms this. His style requires him to act as a generalist, broad-brush historian to provide lessons in political philosophy. Here, he draws on a dramatis personae familiar to readers of his other works: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Raymond Aron, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexis de Tocqueville, Eric Voegelin. Without encountering anything calling itself DEI, critical race theory, or wokeness, they nevertheless questioned the wisdom and prudence of all that. Mahoney comments on current trends, and he quotes, and possibly overquotes, secondary sources to include that murderer’s row of wisemen as well as less-established contemporaries to his ends. Daniel J. Mahoney, the expert in political philosophy, shines here. More so does Daniel J. Mahoney the essayist. He writes well. This is a quick read. Not all slim volumes are.
